Adobe drops Flash for HTML5, officially, for the mobile market.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/adobe-kills-mobile-flash/
This is a glance at how it may effect the mobile market... but what about audio?
Cheers, C3
4 Answers
Not a big fan of flash as such as it is pretty annoyingly unstable, though I am by all means a big fan of many things made in flash, like Weebl, Salad Fingers and such. It seems most of the ones commenting on this focuses a little too much on browser issues, but as an iPhone-user (at least for now) I couldn't care less. What I wonder is what will happen to all this sweet sweet animations??
As far as I can see it, though I'm pretty sure someone else might very well have good reasons to disagree, I can't really see how this would affect my work as a sounddesigner/audio editor in any significant way. I work mostly with feature films, commercials and other more offline-friendly medias, and normally delivers everything in Broadcast Wave anyway, even for those things distributed in flash.
For me, this is a good thing. I hope this will force both YouTube and Vimeo to abandon that system resource-hogging flash in favor of MP4/h264, but still i wonder what will replace it in animation?
answered Nov 10, 2011 at 12:29
This is strictly the MOBILE market- i.e Android, IOS, Symbian, etc. The greater web, and certainly the animation market will continue to have and use Flash. Plus Adobe is pushing AIR, which can include materials that were authored in Flash. Flash's days as a web delivery system are probably going the way of the dodo, but as development/animation tool it will probably be around for a while
The unfortunate thing is that Flash provides a way (via RTMP) to offer somewhat secure audio streaming. While I realize that streamed audio can still be captured, most people are either not going to know how to do it or will not go to the trouble. HTML5 does not (to my knowledge) offer any true streaming capability, nor is audio format support standardized across different browsers. I don't claim to be an expert in this... if someone knows better, let me know... I'd love to have a solution!
My take is from the authorship standpoint: Write-once, deploy-many is a really sexy workflow, which you don't get with HTML, JS, and its derivative technologies, mostly because browsers all interpret HTML, CSS, and JS differently, despite all efforts towards web standards. The QA cycle for Flash is streamlined compared to the multi-variant array of browsers, processors, RAM, and OS's that exist out there for both desktop and mobile. Testing HTML and its variants is a QA nightmare, always has been, and still is, unless you're targeting one browser on one OS.
That said, Flash on devices has been challenged from its early-2000's start. Implementing a subset of Flash will always hobble someone's attempt to port desktop Flash apps to mobile. The processor speed variance between mobile and desktop has also always been a concern.
In terms of audio, AFAIK, HTML5 is not at all finessed. Flash wasn't exactly audio rocket science either, but at least there were streaming, event, and compression parameters you could customize...
